Tying Down The Lion

Tying Down The Lion

Joanna Campbell

Brick Lane Publishing

First published 2015 in the UK by

Brick Lane Publishing Limited

London

www.bricklanepublishing.com

1

Copyright © Joanna Campbell 2015

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

All characters, events and entities in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-9928863-3-2

Illustration: Adam Regester

Design concept: Andrew Macdonald

Graphic design: Renni Johnson

For Adrian, Alexandra, Olivia and Georgia.

For Mum, Dad and Chris.

In memory of Peter Fechter.

Remember, no matter where you go,

there you are.

Confucius

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank

Adrian, for his role as plot consultant and technical wizard, but mostly because I couldn’t be a writer without him.

Alexandra, Olivia and Georgia, for endless enthusiasm, encouragement and inspiration, and for never raising a complaint about the cobwebs.

Cornerstones Literary Consultancy, for their invaluable report on the first draft, particularly Rachel Connor, because without her perception and understanding I might never have seen the wood for the trees.

Lara Schonberger, for reading my words and fulfilling my dream.

Tim Challenger, for his valued memories and sensitive insight into the world of divided Berlin.

Richard Carter (journeytoberlin), for his historical knowledge and helpfulness.

Betty Hill, my mother, for reading to me when I was small, then reading my own stories when I grew up, and my wonderful father for soldering my glasses back together every week.

Berlin, 1967. The Palace of Tears

Mothers are never ill, they never give up searching for lost things and they never cry.

At this moment my mother is doing all three. At least she’s in the right place. Everyone else here is crying too.

“Jacqueline, I wanted so much to come home,” she says. “But it isn’t here.”

“Mum, it depends what you mean by home.”

She keeps shaking her head and clutching my hand. She doesn’t know.

This is the Palace of Tears. We have to say goodbye to Ilse here. She can’t come with us. And we can’t turn back. The visit is over.

“Mum, we have to keep moving.”

My mother led me here. But I must lead her back.

Mothers always hum in public, wear old elastic bands round their wrists and speak even when everyone wants them to shut up. But my mother is doing none of these. She isn’t behaving like a mother at all. I wish I could say something hopeful, the way she did when I was small and scared. But daughters don’t speak in that way. I just steer her into the station.

“I did not say goodbye to my mother, Jacqueline. I looked away,” she says, pressing her hand to her side where her inflamed appendix is sending out sparks.

Mothers are supposed to know what to do. And always get it right. Mum can’t break down now. Not at the East Berlin border control with our pass about to expire. And looking as if she might expire along with it.

Daughters vow never to utter the corny old chestnuts their mothers trot out, never to fuss about the time and never, ever to wear Gay Geranium lipstick.

“Come on, Mum. Keep your chin up. If we don’t join the queue now, we’ll end up running for that train. Quickly now. Er…chop, chop?”

All right, I won’t say never. Apart from the lipstick.

1.
Desperation

“Jacqueline, I’ll be going to Berlin over my dead body.”

“That won’t be easy, Grandma,” I tell her, trying to coax her bulk out of the front-door. “Here, have a jaw-clamping toffee.”

Mum has lived here for twenty years, but she still doesn’t call it home. When he finally tore up his L-plate, Dad said the winds of war had wafted the seeds of her to 31 Audette Gardens, but like the dandelions caught in the cracks of the pavement, her roots were trapped in Berlin. Grandma pointed out it wasn’t Dad talking. It was the rum and pep.

This is our most important moment since last Friday, when Dad’s win from the three-thirty at Haydock finally earned us enough to have the Morris Traveller welded back together. Dad didn’t actually win the money himself. It was a filly called Gay Hostess.

Gluing Grandma’s mouth with toffee is the only way to watch
Opportunity Knocks
without her shouting, “Take the money, you daft git!” or “Open the box, ugly!” We don’t have the heart to tell her she’s got the wrong programme. She thinks the clapometer is a temperature gauge for the television set.

But she won’t take the bait today.

“I’ll not set foot in that car. It’s riddled with death-watch beetle,” she says, a cigarette clamped between her lips even when she’s talking. Which is all the time.

“Grandma, Dad paid fifty pounds for it,” my little brother, Victor, says, glancing up from
Commando
. “The seats are real vinyl.”

“And in this heat it’ll stick to my arse something chronic.”

“Grandma said ‘arse’,” Victor announces before returning to the Battle of Britain.

“Let’s go then!” Dad shouts, one hand clapping Grandma on the back and the other clipping Victor round the ear. “Pack up your comic, Victor. Come on, Ma.”

“Not bloody likely, Roy.” Grandma says, lumbering towards Big Stan’s butcher’s van and shoehorning herself into the back seat. “I’ve got the jitters. Anyroad, since it’s a Monday, Stan and Elsie will have bought a quarter pound of buttered Brazils and set their cribbage out.”

She squeezes in between half a pig and two dozen blocks of dripping. She’d want to visit their pre-fab even if they were offering tinned-pear with top-of-the-milk and a game of Russian roulette. They’ve only come round to collect her parrot.

“It’ll just be temporary, Deborah,” Grandma croons to the daft bird. “You shan’t be uprooted for long.”

“Roots! Do your bloody roots, Elsie!” Deborah squawks. Elsie’s hand flies up to her blue rinse.

“I’ll tell you what, son!” Grandma screeches above the din. “Why don’t you stop at home? Put your savings on a nice accumulator instead. Stan would devil me kidneys for tea.”

“Your kidneys can go to the bloody devil, along with the rest of you,” Dad mutters, already in despair with Grandma for teaching Deborah to warble “House of the Rising Sun” after changing it to “House of the Striding Hun”.

“Nell, I shall crawl to Berlin if I must,” Mum calls out, pacing between the car and the van.

“Jesus wept, Bridget,” Dad says to Mum. “Calm down. At this rate we’ll have World War Three before we’ve driven to the end of Audette Gardens.”

He paces around the car, a cigarette fastened to his mouth. Stan climbs down from the van and clamps his ham-like hands around Dad’s. After that they do a lot of back-slapping and make manly noises, Dad’s beetle-black hair flopping over his eyes. When Dad spent hours practising double-declutches and kangaroo-hops up and down Audette Gardens, Stan sat beside him in his bloodied apron, which is why the car still stinks of lamb’s liver.

On Sundays, Victor, Mum and I all squashed into the back seat to be bumped around the scrubland at the back of the mop-and-brush factory because it was more fun than watching
Ice Cold in Alex
on the television again.

“Talking about your trip, Roy, guess what I’ve just read in the
Meat Trades Journal
?” Stan says. “Some East German butcher’s only gone and strapped on a whole load of gammon slices and sausages, hasn’t he? Covered himself in raw meat and threw himself over that Wall. Shot at left, right and centre, he was. Bullets flying all over the shop. But here’s the best bit. The meat only went and took all the bullets, didn’t it? Can you believe it, mate? A slug in the rump. A pellet in the pork chop. And he’s not got a mark on him. What d’you think of that, eh? Want to take some best end of neck with you, eh, Roy mate?”

“Tell you what though, Stan,” Dad says, “it must have made an offal mess.”

They share a belly laugh, the male sort that goes on and on, and get so excited their hair falls out of its Brylcreem.

“Bloody ugh,” Victor says. But I bet he’s planning on wrapping a bacon rasher round his Action Man.

Once the laughter ends, Dad starts lighting one cigarette from another. His hands are shaking so much he can hardly strike his matches.

“I’m hot, Dad,” Victor shouts, his face shining like basted beef. “Why can’t I wear my shorts? I think my legs are suffocating.”

“All packed, aren’t they, Bridget?” Grandma shouts to Mum from the van. “Only temporary, mind. We won’t get further than the end of Audette Gardens. Soon be unpacking it all again.” Deborah joins in with the cackling until Elsie throws a cardigan over the cage.

“Nell, please,” Mum says, nervous as a spider spinning in the wind.

“Unpacking it all and hanging the whole lot back up,” Grandma repeats, tittering.

“Nell, Roy will drive us safely to Berlin.”

“I can’t travel on an empty stomach, Bridge.”

“I gave you a shredded-wheat.”

“And it’s worked its way into my denture. I’m having to talk through a haystack. Not the same as a fry-up, is it? Even the way you cremate a sausage, Bridge.”

But Grandma is already taking out her big blue roller to test if her front curl has set firm, and she only does that when we’re going to the Berni steakhouse or for Her Majesty’s speech on the television.

“Nell, please come,” Mum persists.

“I’m busy.”

“No, you are hiding in Stan’s van.”

“I’m inspecting his pork loins, thank you.”

Victor and I climb into the back of the car, and Dad, smelling new and leathery in his car-coat and driving-gloves, takes his place in the front-seat. We all swelter while we wait.

“Grandma would live on Jamaica Ginger cake and tobacco if she stayed here alone,” Dad says, gripping his steering-wheel, the horrors of last night already forgotten.

“Why can’t she stay at Elsie’s?” Victor asks.

“Elsie won’t have her anymore. She rubs up a bit close to Stan.”

I imagine her heaving her sixteen stone across their card-table, enquiring after his premium sausage-meat.

Dad stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray, lights another and asks, “Can you smell that?”

“Smell what?” Victor asks.

“That funny old whiff.”

“Grandma’s not in the car yet, Dad. She’ll have pumped in the van by now.”

“Not that, Victor. Sniff it. Go on.”

The car fills with snorting. My friend Gillian’s Ford Corsair smells of the French Fern talcum powder that clogs up her mother’s cleavage. They used to have a green Mini, but she didn’t fit.

After humouring Dad for a minute, Victor and I give up.

“It’s the smell of travel,” he says, beaming. “You see, Mum shoved that old bag in…”

“No, Dad. Grandma’s not…”

“Victor, I’m warning you, son. I mean the pong of that tatty tartan bag in the boot, full of old sand and the stink of those rubbery shoes you wear at the seaside. Nothing in the world smells like travel.”

I don’t know about that. I reckon holidays are all about blundering through obstacles. In fact, I can’t think of anything else they’re good for. Rock-pools and funicular railways are all right, but even those will be thin on the ground in Berlin.

I don’t mind the new haircuts and the old case packed full of clothes with the tang of last summer. But this time we’re driving. Abroad. To Berlin. In the Cold War. Checkpoints. Miles of barbed wire, armed guards with hungry dogs, Dad’s weak stomach for food that isn’t white or beige. And the Wall.

Uphill all the way. Mind you, downhill would be worse since our brakes don’t work properly.

In Audette Gardens, the best grass grows in the worn-out pavement, parents shout with the back-door open and dads sit in their vests to watch the wrestling, but it actually looks pretty with the neighbours’ curtains flapping out of their open windows and the sun drying out the damp on the pebbledash. I wouldn’t mind being at home all summer, especially now Mum and Dad have recovered from their Saturday row. He lost a whole week’s housekeeping on a horse, and she threw an entire brick of ice-cream at the television.

“Your outsider looks more like a constipated mule. And his eyes are crossed,” Grandma said before the screen was obliterated. “No wonder he’s galloped in a circle and bounced off the railings.”

Dad was hunched in his jockey’s crouch on the patchwork pouffe, banging his hands on the floor and yelling, “Come on, my son,” at the dreadful old nag. I don’t mean Grandma. By then she was busy side-stepping puddles of Neapolitan.

Mum couldn’t go to the shops without money, so our Sunday dinner was a bashed-up packet of frozen braised-beef-in-gravy Dad bought from the corner shop with the emergency shilling sellotaped to the underside of the sick-basin.

“Tastes like cardboard in a puddle,” Victor whispered.

When Elsie and Stan arrived this morning, Grandma hissed, “Say you had prime-rib if anyone asks.”

Elsie is shoving Grandma out of the van and saying, “Oh, Nellie, you may never come back, you know. There’s soldiers on every corner and you’re bound to rub them up the wrong way.”

“Chance would be a fine thing,” Grandma says, patting her curls before launching herself at Stan for a goodbye kiss that nearly sends Deborah’s cage flying and prompts her to shriek, “The Hun’s here!”

I have asked to cross through the Berlin Wall with Mum because I’m writing about it for a school project. But this is a project for her as well. I’m on a mission to make her look at me again. At the moment, all I have is a picture of a Berlin factory cut out from a magazine and a lot of blank pages in a Woolworth’s notepad. But I’m dying to see how she looks at me when I show it to her.

When Mum arrived in England after the war, she had lost touch with her family. Their house in Berlin had been bombed in an air raid and she had no idea if they were still alive. She wrote nonstop to old friends in the city until she found some who had survived and were able to track her two sisters down. Beate and Ilse lived together at that time, but six years ago, the Wall came between them. Now Beate lives in West Berlin and Ilse is behind the Wall in the East. They can’t visit each other, but Mum plans to see them both.

I pick up a few of Grandma’s jitters now we are about to leave. I wish Mum could be English, with me still young enough to sit on the kerb and wait for the jangle of the ice-cream van and have Mum reach for my hand while we queue for a Mivvi.

Her face crumples when she touches her sisters’ faded faces in an old picture on the sideboard. It leans against the honeymoon photograph of my parents on a tandem in Ruislip, which is black and white with smudges of experimental colour. Dad has apricot cheeks and Mum’s blonde curls look like a cluster of egg-yolks. The way they’re smiling makes me think about having a husband. I don’t know why, when being married is all about buying fridges and paying the coalman and having someone’s teeth grinning at you from a glass by the bed.

While Dad tries to start the engine, Victor and I melt into the baking seat and squabble over a barley sugar stuck to the road-atlas. Victor presses his tongue against the window. I have no idea why. Seven-year-old boys do that kind of thing.

Assisted by a final push from Elsie, Mum tugs Grandma away from Big Stan and frogmarches her into the car, promising her the front seat, a U-turn after five minutes if she doesn’t like it and custody of the Everton mints.

“Since you like shifting folk from their homes, Bridge, you should do a better job of knocking down the bloody great cobwebs on my front-room ceiling,” Grandma says, squeezing into the car, not so much a fish out of water as a whale in a sardine-tin. “Forcing us to God-forsaken places. Packing poor Deborah off to Elsie’s. She’ll have to watch
Z-Cars
. And you know how the sirens make her feathers droop.”

For weeks, a spider has been weaving a web between Deborah’s cage and the standard lamp-shade tassels. It’s probably clinging to the bars of the cage now it’s been torn away, hanging by a thread and about to find temporary refuge in Elsie’s hair before throwing out a new line of silk and beginning to spin all over again.

“Ma, Deborah will be fine with Elsie,” Dad tells her.

“She’ll scatter millet over the trifle and grind her beak on the bars.”

“Elsie should know better at her age.”

“Oh, you’ve got me over a barrel, I suppose.”

Not an attractive image.

“Come on, Mum, you know fine well you’ll treat Beate’s place like a home from home,” Dad tells her.

“Home is where the heart is,” she says, clapping her hands together on her mountainous chest and rattling her necklaces against her white holiday cardigan.

“More like home is where the fart is,” Victor hisses in my ear.

Dad stalls thirteen times and just as we can’t hold our breath anymore, we launch out of Audette Gardens with Grandma winding down the window and shouting, “Lock up your children, there’s a madman on the streets!”

Sod it. She’s sitting on the holiday chocolate. Five-Boy bars cost 7d, so we can’t have them all the time like Bluebird toffees, which actually taste of bicycle oil. I didn’t even get to see the pictures on the wrapper that show five different chocolate-wanting expressions on the face of a frightening boy in a sailor suit. Desperation, Pacification, Expectation, Acclamation and Realisation are now melted and oozing, sandwiched between the hot vinyl and Grandma’s crimplene frock. I sympathise with the first of the five.

I look back to see our neighbour, Mrs Pither, vaulting over the fence with her shears and snipping the heads off our goutweed. Dad thinks it’s a proper plant called Snow-in-the-Mountain, but Mrs P says it’s a wild flower that smells of cat-piddle. Two sides to everything, I suppose.